Friday, March 29, 2013

Truncated transcript from today’s SCOTUS argument

ROBERTS: In keeping with the practices of this Court, we don’t allow anyone to complete a full sentence before interrupting them. Tell us why the people who hired you should even be allowed to bring a case.

COOPER: Because California said so....

BREYER: I’m going to ask you an extremely long question riddled with nonspecific nouns, and you’re going to have to guess what I mean by it.

COOPER: I’m pretty sure the answer is no? But let’s stop talking about whether I should be allowed to talk, and get on to what I’m going to be talking about. Which is: nostalgia. Nostalgia for the good old days of traditional, bedrock values. Man, back in 1971, this Court said there was no federal question as to same-sex marriage. Those were the fucking days....

Ted Olson’s turn.

OLSON: We all know that if you don’t decide on behalf of respondents, you’ll be heralded as bigots for generations to come, so—

ROBERTS: Before we get to the question of our bigotry, can we talk about standing?

OLSON: Yeah, they have none....

SCALIA: I’m going to ask you a ridiculous question: When did it become unconstitutional to discriminate against gays and lesbians?

OLSON: It would be bad form at this juncture to say, “Fuck you, Scalia, you just want to grandstand,” so I’m just going to say it’s a nonsensical question....

JUSTICES, COLLECTIVELY: Yeah, none of us are buying it. It’s probably the only thing that the nine of us agree on....

SOTOMAYOR: Okay, but lemme explain how the Supreme Court works. We’re actually terrified of screwing up. That’s why we mainly take cases where there’s a circuit split—because then there’s a lot of arguments on both sides. We’re all kind of freaked out here, because no matter what we decide, someone will be out for our blood. We avoided doing the right thing on racial segregation as a court for 50 years. Why not do this here?

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